More on the real fight: Keep your eye on the delegates

AP File PhotoNewt Gingrich: Why should he quit while he's still amassing delegates?

As I noted in a prior post, I get irritated by all this horse-race coverage of the presidential primary that doesn't tell us just which position the horses are in.

It's not a fight for the popular vote; it's a fight for delegates.

Here's a good piece on RealClear politics in which Sean Trende speculates that Mitt Romney may not get to 1,144 delegates by the time he visits Tampa this August:

While Romney had a good night on Super Tuesday, the truth is that he did nothing to alter the basic regional nature of his support. He won handily in New England and the West, essentially tied in the Midwest, and ran poorly in the South.

Given the structure of the primary season, this portends a long slog to the nomination, and makes it difficult for Romney to wrap up the nomination early on.

And here's a good piece on the difficulties the Santorum campaign has had mounting delegate slates.

In some states, the Santorum campaign’s disorganization in the delegate race has had a bigger impact than in others. Missing a chance at some of Virginia’s 46 delegates, for instance, was a pretty big deal.

But an analysis of the Ohio results shows that Santorum would have won only seven more delegates in the Buckeye State on Tuesday if he had submitted full slates of delegates. (He won four congressional districts where he did not submit full slates.)

But when you got back to Trende's piece on RealClear politics, you see that when it comes to delegates he makes a projection Romney will have just 1,071 delegates at the end of primary season.

At that point it would be impossible to predict just what would happen in Tampa. But both Gingrich and Ron Paul would have enough delegates to put Romney over the top once the deal-making began.

So that would be great fun.

In any event, by his calculations it's a virtual certainty that our June primary here in New Jersey will matter for the first time in a long time. Usually we get to go to the polls long after the issue has been decided. This year, we will have a fun race.

"We are staying in this race because I believe it's going to be impossible for a moderate to win the general election," Gingrich told a crowd in Montgomery.

AND here's a piece on Ron Paul's strategy. As I have noted, he knows he's unlikely to wing but is amassing delegates to have influence at the convention. Also, note how clueless the comments are. A great mass of well-meaning, but naive, Paul supporters somehow think it would be treasonous to actually make a deal with those delegates.we political experts have a technical term for that sort of person: "moron."A candidate does not go through all the work of winning delegates just to throw them away at the convention. That would be stupid. And Ron Paul is not stupid. If it comes to a crunch, count on him to use his delegate to maximum advantage.